Familiarizing with the word toe

Are you familiar with the word toe? If not, don't worry. It's a very simple word and easy to undertand. Just look down at your feet right now and you'll find right at the end of it what we call toes. On Dictionary.com, it says a toe is one of the terminal digits of the human foot, but it sounds just too classy for what in portuguese we simply know as dedo do pé. That's what toe or toes are: dedos do pé. By its literal meaning, you can stand on your toe, as in "She stood on her toe to kiss him.", you can tread on someone's toe, as in "Ouch! That was my toe you just tread on." It doesn't stop there, there's more. You can dip your toe in a river to test the temperature, and of course if you're not careful enough, you'll end up breaking, bruising, cracking or stubbing your toe against something. That way, you'd have a toe injury.

But those are only literal usages of the word toe. What is exciting about the word toe or many other words in any given language is that it can also have a figurative meaning. For example, you can literaly tread on someon's toe, but if you tread on a lot of toes when you join a company, you may have a lot of problems in the future with your coworkers. The same way, if you dip your toe in a new market, it means you're just doing things very slowly and carefully because you're not sure whether you'll be succesful or whether you'll like it. Have you ever heard of the expression "from tip to toe"? Imagine for example yourself leaving a store covered with brand new clothes. Suppose now that you end up running into a friend of yours at the door who notices you and says: "Look at you! You're wearing all new clothes from tip to toe." Here what he actually meant to say was that you were entirely dressed in new clothes. Pretty easy huh?

If you're a teacher, you'll totally relate to what I'm about to say. Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a mess in classroom? Your students don't pay attention, they throw paper balls at each other and you need immediately to come up with something to keep them engaged, something that forces them to concentrate and keep giving their attention and energy to what they're doing. A couple of extra things and some activities would be one of the solutions for that problem. So you do it. Later on while talking to another teacher, he asks you: What did you do keep them so engaged and quiet? And you answer: I just gave them a couple of extra things to do just to keep them on their toes. If you keep someone on his toes, you're forcing them to give devotion to what he's doing.